After her nine-year-old granddaughter was brutally attacked in her own bed, a Surrey, B.C., woman is talking about the sexual assault that terrified a Guildford nieghbourhood this week.

The grandmother -- who can't be identified to protect the little girl's identity -- has raised the child since she was a baby.

She told CTV News that she had assumed her granddaughter was asleep in her bed early Friday morning.

"About quarter after four or four o'clock…she came in our room, which is right next to her room, and said, ‘I've been raped,'" the grandmother said.

"I didn't even think she knew what that word meant."

She called 911, and asked the little girl what happened.

"He warned her, stabbed her in the arm to make sure she knew he had a knife, and he used it to warn her and just told her, ‘Don't make any noise,' and said that he had a friend with him and would make sure that me and my husband would be harmed."

Police are now looking for a white man of average height and medium build in his 30s. Officers are now canvassing the area and interviewing neighbours.

One of the biggest unanswered questions is how someone could have entered the house.

The grandmother said that she found two deadlocks unfastened and a bathroom door unlocked after the attack -- all locks that she had secured before going to bed for the night.

"They were locked. Every night. I am totally paranoid about that," she said.

She's suspicious that only someone who's familiar with the house and the little girl would know how to find her bedroom, which is separated from the rest of the house by a bathroom.

"Would most normal people know to walk through the bathroom?"

Police won't say if they're investigating anyone close to the victim's family.

Her grandmother says she'll have an alarm system installed before the girl comes back from her father's house, where she's been staying since the attack.

But the family plans to move out shortly.

"I'm from the country. I don't feel safe in the city -- I never have," the grandmother said. "Nobody is safe."

Anyone with information about the assault should call Surrey RCMP at 604-599-7613.

Police are not connecting this attack with another recent incident, in which a Surrey woman was sexually assaulted at knifepoint on April 12.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Shannon Paterson